Beloved
by ncfan
Summary: -Neji x Tenten- "What would you do without me?" AU.


**Characters**: Neji, Tenten, Lee**  
Summary**: "What would you do without me?"**  
Pairings**: NejiTen**  
Author's Note**: This is set in an alternate universe where Konoha is at war with Iwa. Just a oneshot highlighting the life of Team Gai during wartime; there's not much plot to it, not really.**  
Disclaimer**: I don't own Naruto.

* * *

The ground sometimes shivers, sometimes quakes, and at others splits open from the inside out, obeying the quake of enemy Iwa nin and betraying the feet of the Leaf. The dark forest soon grows significantly lighter as thick, dense trees of unknown age and origin disappear into the abyss that yawns up before the unfortunate Konoha nin.

Neji wonders when the end will come, and from where. His eyes have seen death fly towards vessels of blood and bone for days on end now, and maybe he'll see death coming for him, too, in the form of kunai and shuriken or the song of senbon in the air.

After all, it's come for nearly everyone else.

-0-

"We got some news from Konoha this morning." Tenten's voice barely manages to make an impact on Neji's awareness until she snaps fingers in front of his face and Neji jumps a little, equating the sound with twigs being snapped until he sees her eyes. Warm eyes, kind eyes, eyes that are brown, not blue like the majority of the Iwa, eyes that are familiar to him. Eyes that make him feel just a little warmer where the fire can not.

The camp is small, housing no more than a dozen nin—it used to have more, Neji registers numbly. Used to have about two dozen instead of a single, but there are empty beds now that yawn like a rough, tossing sea trying to drown everyone nearby. Two empty beds between him and Lee on one side; three between him and a nin whose name he's never known though they've saved each other's lives more than once on the other. Sometimes, Neji has dreams about the ones who have died. He can't remember them afterwards, but they always leave him feeling empty at the stomach.

He wonders if Tenten ever as the same dreams, or something like them.

Now, they are sitting by the small fire—it can't be too large or left alight for too long, lest the Iwa spot the light—after dark, while the night operatives are out performing their tasks and Neji and Tenten sit first watch, to alert those left behind if the enemy should come. From one of the small nearby tents, Neji can hear Lee snoring.

Neji's voice is slightly dry and cracked—it's been a few hours since he last drank from his canteen—as he responds, just a touch listless, to Tenten's soft pronouncement. "What… did the message say?"

He's staring into the fire but can still feel Tenten shift on her knees, unease growing within her like a flicker brought to flame. A hand with long fingers and chipped, uneven fingernails slides into his and Neji doesn't try to shake her away, only squeezes his own fingers shut over hers.

"Supplies will be sent as soon as possible; I'd written back requesting more. Konoha has little to spare, so it's likely that none of what we get will be high-grade stuff, if we get it at all," Tenten adds darkly, and Neji knows the same thought has occurred to her as it has to him. Iwagakure is low on supplies too and is all too happy to raid supply caravans. Anything for Konoha's food or the superior metal of their weapons.

"Well, as long as we end up with some more flares I'm not complaining," Neji mutters. "It'll be nice to communicate properly with the other camps again." He shoots a piercing glance at her. "I take it there's more?" Tenten wouldn't have stiffened and gone on edge just because they were unlikely to receive decent supplies; she's ANBU, she's tough, and she knows how to rough it, actually enjoys "roughing it" far more than Neji used to. If she had parents, they would be proud, so proud—or at least Neji thinks they would be. He's never known Tenten's parents, nor known her to speak of them. For all he knows, they wouldn't be.

Now, it's Tenten who stares deep into the fire, and the dancing flames cast shadows on her face that rival the qualities her hawk mask gives her. She pauses for a long time, to the point that Neji comes to rest his free hand on her closest shoulder, feeling bones through the cloth of her plain shirt—she's dispensed with the flak jacket for the night. "Tenten?"

She can't meet his eyes. "We… They…" Finally, she sighs, squeezes her eyes tightly shut as though suffering from a migraine, and Tenten, usually so much less delicate with her words, manages to shore them up enough to speak. "Konoha… will not," she manages, voice starting to shake a little bit, "be recalling us at the previously established date."

A cold hand reaches from above to squeeze Neji's heart mercilessly. "But Tenten…" His voice is taut "…we've been out here for three months. That's nearly twice as long as usual assignments." Konoha is supposed to rotate the nin out in the field with the nin back in the village still accepting normal missions (the economy has to be kept up somehow) during wartime; apparently, they're being a little more lax about that than normal.

"I know, I know."

Sighing, Neji leans over and freeing his hand from her grip slides his arm around Tenten's shoulder, cheek against her dirty hair—it's not like any of them have had access to shower water in quite a while; all have gotten used to the smell of body odor, and Neji doesn't really mind if her hair is at all greasy. "Did they… say when they will be calling us back now?" he asks tiredly.

"I don't know." Tenten's voice is quiet and more defeated than Neji has ever heard it. It's a terrible sound, like a death knell. "They wouldn't say."

-0-

When his shift is spent and Neji is allowed to retreat, trudging, feet dragging the dirt, back to his pallet in the tent, Lee is still snoring—such an incredibly deep sleeper for a shinobi—so that Neji has to throw a pillow at him (and this _still_ doesn't wake Lee up, though it does shut him up). After all his energy—chakra reserves are low and depleted still from so many straight days of running, fighting, killing, taking hits—is spent on this one task, he collapses on the pallet, and stares up at the brown tarp ceiling of his tent.

The tent is moth-eaten and there are little pinprick holes in the ceiling, shining black, like, to Neji's eyes, anti-stars. He's spent several nights counting the holes, and he always forgets the number when he wakes up the next morning. If Neji's not careful, he tries to see constellations that he should be seeing in the sky there. The acrid smell of stale sweat commingled with dried blood permeates the air.

With only the sound of his heart beating and Lee's breathing, quieter now, for company, Neji finds himself back on the dreaded subject.

He's made a list, of all the things he misses, living out here for so long. Three months should only be twelve weeks but it feels more like an eternity spent in Hell. Neji misses having clean water to drink every day and take a shower in every night. He misses the smell of pork barbecue emanating from stands and restaurants. He misses bird calls from the parks. He even misses the company of his two cousins and the Branch Family Hyuuga, even there where Neji knows he has never been anything more than a prisoner.

It's no good telling himself that he'll be able to see and smell and hear and feel all that again. Because Neji has no idea when he'll be going home. He has no idea if he'll _ever_ go home.

-0-

The camp is now over-flowing with nin from a camp that's been destroyed nearby. The earth seems to have its own pulse and Neji frowns at it, feeling irritation despite everything, because they're already struggling and now, there's nearly two dozen more nin here. Someone's erecting another makeshift tent as he stands at the outskirts of the camp and watches the progress of the uninjured and the wounded, all bedraggled with sagging shoulders, into the camp. He thinks he catches a glimpse of Ino's pale blonde hair, but it's just a girl wearing yellow cloth on her head.

"What are you doing standing out here?" Tenten approaches, disentangling herself from the crowd and wiping blood off a kunai, dull green shirt splattered with blood—she's just come back from a mission. There's a tired smile on her pale, stretched face—the forests of Tsuchi no Kuni are especially dense, and they probably only see sunlight for about an hour a day—and hairs are escaping from her single bun; she dispensed with the twin coils above either ear when she entered into ANBU.

Neji shrugs lackadaisically, skin prickling slightly under the presence of her smile. "Waiting for you or Lee," he mutters unnecessarily. "And trying to see if there was anyone I know out in this pack I know."

"Well?" There's a strangely playful quality to her voice that Neji can swear shouldn't be there but isn't quite sure why, as Tenten's smile grows slightly. "_Is_ there anyone you know?"

"No, no one."

"Ah." Tenten plops gracelessly down on to a thick, gnarled tree trunk and flips open her kunai holster, drawing a whetstone from her pocket and laying out the kunai to sharpen them. Three of them are so dull that they wouldn't break the skin if they were thrust against a shinobi's arm, and all can use sharpening. Neji is at first met by the top of her head but then, Tenten looks up and smiles, a little strangely. "So, you been out there recently?"

"No…" Neji answers, slowly, pale eyes narrowing as he stares down at her.

"Well, you will be soon, is my guess. Be careful, Neji. It's a jungle out there. The Iwa nin are even more savage than usual."

-0-

_Five_. This is the fifth time that Neji's hair has flown into his face in the past half hour, as he brandishes his long hands like weapons once again—and really, that's what they are, weapons—and advances towards the Iwa nin again, legs working almost of their own accord. There's no worrying about his chakra reserves now; he'll run himself into the ground if he has to, kill himself from chakra depletion to win the fight.

Given the way they treat their captives, capture by the Rock is _not_ an option. Inuzuka Kiba will limp for the rest of his life and Haruno Sakura's still in the hospital after three months of treatment—in the psychiatric ward.

The Iwa shinobi has a shock of fair hair and pale, milky blue eyes, teeth that snarl over thin lips and when Neji looks at him through weary, straining eyes he has to fight not to equate those features with Yamanaka Ino or Uzumaki Naruto—both, he understands, have ancestry in Iwagakure—because if he does he won't be able to fight, won't be able to finish the job, and he can't have that, not now, not ever.

Neji keeps stepping back into trees; he can't get a decent range on the nin anywhere in this dense forest, but the enemy's been trained for both close quarters and the open plains that exist where there are no trees.

Instead, he strikes at every chakra point he can find, eyes straining, until the Iwagakure shinobi, a young man hardly older than he is, is screaming and howling and backing away, scrambling clumsily and dropping his kunai, though never so much as framing a single world that could be construed as a plea for mercy.

And Neji doesn't stop there.

He keeps striking, this time with a kunai drawn from the holster on his thigh. First the hands, then the feet. Then going up and down the limbs, slowly, hands working on their own, until the Iwa nin looks more like a block of Swiss cheese left to melt in the sun, face barely looking like a face and more like a twisted, mangled hunk of flesh, blood oozing from every inch of skin.

Neji takes a step back, gasping, to survey his grisly work.

A bit of cloth is ripped from the dead man's pants, and used to clean the gory kunai, before it is re-holstered.

It's over.

For now.

-0-

Hair down, which is highly unusual for her in any circumstance, Tenten frowns as she stares at the long, overgrown locks of brown hair, sitting on her pallet. Her hair has grown lank and limp and horrifically greasy in the long weeks its been since she's last had a shower or been rained on. Tenten's never been terribly vain, but this terrible mass of dirty, smelly hair is heavy on her and makes her feel filthy all over. She's finally grown too tired of it to not do something to rectify the situation.

"Mariko?" Mariko is the only other kunoichi in the tent with her at the moment; the flap has been pegged open to let in weak sunlight, and this shines on the other woman's badly tanned face.

"Yes, Tenten-san?" Mariko is a friendly girl with a round face and mousy brown hair and eyes. She's a seventeen-year-old chunin, painfully green. She was deemed too plain to be put on seduction missions, so instead her body will be put to use on the front lines. She's already been raped once—and Tenten shudders and wonders how the girl can look so _cheerful_ after something like that, even though it was months ago (especially given the fact that the same experience came within a millimeter of breaking Sakura's mind, and Sakura, Tenten is sure, is probably quite a bit stronger, both physically and mentally than Mariko, and even more especially given that Mariko was only raped once and Sakura, as a captive, well… God only knows how many times it was); Mariko must be stronger than she initially thought, if she can keep from going utterly insane after having something like that happen to her—and, of course, Konoha doesn't recall her. Konoha only recalls nin if they've reached the end of their slots, or if they're in a body bag.

Or, maybe, Mariko is even more insane than Sakura, so insane that it doesn't show anymore. War is _not_ kind to kunoichi.

"Have you got a pair of scissors on you? I left mine at home."

-0-

Neji gapes at Tenten as she emerges from the tent. He's only been back from assignment for fifteen minutes, and now _this._

"Tenten." Neji may be gaping, but Lee manages to find words more quickly than he does. Lee's face is oddly strangled, his voice even more so. "Tenten, your _hair_…"

Her brown eyes widen quite innocently, that innocent look that Neji has learned to fear like the plague or Naruto when he starts up the Kage Bunshin trick. "Yes…"

Neji regains use of his tongue. "It's short," he says flatly.

Tenten's hair is indeed very short, barely resting at the level of her chin, her bangs tucked behind her ears to keep them from getting in her eyes. The whole structure of her face looks entirely different with her hair down and so short, and Neji quickly decides that he doesn't like it like this at _all._

Lee, however, smiles widely and laughs a little. "Tenten, are you taking a leaf from the book of our Sakura-san?"

"God no!" Tenten exclaims immediately, and for a moment there's nothing but light-hearted shock and gaiety to be had by all.

Then, they remember, and the mood takes a one hundred and eighty degree shift.

Lee winces and his face becomes a mask of misery and impotent rage, and a little bit of fear when Tenten fixes him in her fearsome glare. Neji chooses to stare down at the ground and register with fascination that the leaf crushed beneath his foot belongs to an oak tree.

It's slips of the tongue like this that makes everything seem so dark. Anything can trigger it.

-0-

It's later in the night when Neji finally feels that the tension has diffused enough that he can approach Tenten on the subject of her hair without it triggering some sort of explosion; Tenten is usually so calm but he wouldn't put anything past her, not anything at all, especially not when he's seen her do the things she's proven herself capable of out here.

Everyone, Neji supposes, becomes a bit of a monster in war. Bits and body parts of one great beast that operates on fear and bloodlust and the visceral _want_, the desperate need to survive.

It's suppertime—at least what passes for suppertime, with canteens of stale water and food pills and freeze-dried packets of raisins and jerky that after a long day of fighting tastes like a feast anyway, proving that there's no greater condiment than hunger—and Tenten is sitting on a log by the fire with a brown-haired kunoichi on her left side and no one on the right. Lee's talking up a young chunin away from the fire—nothing less than honorable, Neji's sure, given Lee's scruples.

Neji sits down beside her. Tenten smiles, but Neji's face is serious. "Tenten, why did you cut your hair?" No need to beat around the bush, but he can see why Tenten might think he's being just a little ridiculous once the words leave his mouth—_Did I really have to say that so flatly_?

It's bad when he starts to question his own tone of voice.

Thankfully, and good thing for Neji, if Tenten takes offense to this she doesn't show it, and is just as straightforward as he was. "Because, it's getting filthy (it's still filthy, really, but I can't tell as much), and it gets in the way almost constantly. Keeping my hair long was perfectly alright when I was back in Konoha, with ready access to bath water and shampoo, but out here it's _not_ alright." She casts a knowing look at Neji's hair. "I'm surprised you aren't encountering the same difficulties; you keep your hair longer than I did."

Neji shrugs uncomfortably, avoiding looking at Tenten. "I'm still surprised."

"What, you don't like it?" There is, again, something wrong in the way Tenten's voice hits playful notes, a thin, coy smile forming on her long mouth. Something knowing there, and something else that makes Neji's cheeks burn, a quality thankfully hidden by the darkness.

"It's…nice…but…"

"But?" Tenten leans towards him, smile growing.

"…but I liked it better before," Neji chokes out lamely.

"It'll grow back."

"I know that."

Then, abruptly, Tenten pulls away and Neji feels oddly disappointed, oddly thwarted. "That's nice," Tenten murmurs, chin tilted upwards ever so slightly, eyes abstracted and glazed and staring straight across the tiny clearing. She's not listening to him anymore, or anything else.

Neji almost smiles as he listens to the nin talking. Though he dislikes overcrowding, truly, it's nice that the camp is no longer so deathly quiet as it was a few days past. He hates the silence, a trait picked up from living in the Hyuuga compound where everything is always quiet to the point of muteness.

However, that talk is probably the reason no one notices the cracking of branches and leaves until the kunai start screaming through the air.

-0-

Tenten hisses vile obscenities as she tears back to the tent to get her katana from the pallet, avoiding throngs of warring nin as she does so. The way she berates herself is a manner unique to her, with wry observations biting insults.

The tent is dark and dank and utterly without light. Down on her knees, Tenten fumbles clumsily among the dead leaves and the sheets until her hand hits the cold metal of the hilt of her katana. The sheath is ripped off within a quarter of a second and the metal feels good in Tenten's hands, like it will always belong there.

She emerges back into the campground that has become a battleground and immediately her sword is tearing into the backs and legs of nin. If she can see their hitai-ate she's sure, if she sees blue eyes she's partially sure, and Tenten simply preys that she won't hack down any Konoha nin. Tenten is simply a killing machine; there is no stopping her once she gets started.

And when she sees a tall figure fall in the darkness, and recognizes him the moment before he crumples to the ground, a soundless scream tears from Tenten's lips.

And after that, she can't remember anything but blood splattering against her mouth.

-0-

Neji wakes up three days later. He has been dreaming for those three days, and when his eyes flicker open he expects to find himself back in Konohagakure. He _wants_, so badly, to be back in Konoha, so badly he can almost taste that longing on his tongue.

But he's not in Konoha.

Instead, he's lying in a field hospital on the border of Kusa no Kuni, the pale white walls seeming as thin as rice paper; Neji doesn't even have to strain to hear voices through the walls. The only reason he can tell he's in Kusa no Kuni and not Hi no Kuni is because the walls are so painfully thin, and because condensation from humidity is gathering on the windowpane.

The phantom memory of shuriken crushes his skin as Neji remembers what happened and waves of pain ripple over him to draw him fully back to consciousness. And he knows now that he really should have been moving around a bit more, so that Iwa nin wouldn't have been able to come up on his blind spot.

"Whatever it is you did wrong, I'm sure it was quite epic, Neji."

It's Tenten's voice and never has a taunt from her mouth been more welcome to Neji—it means she's still alive, unharmed to the extent that she doesn't have to stay in a hospital bed. He focuses eyes on her face and, in his mind she's never looked more beautiful than she does now: newly short hair sticking out in all directions, clothes all down in dust, dried blood on her cuffs and so incredibly _alive_.

Tenten comes and sits down on the edge of the bed, her smile growing sympathetic.

"I'm sure it was very epic too, Tenten, except I'm not sure exactly _what_ it was I did wrong," Neji murmurs, lungs heaving and aching for the pressure this places on them.

The small laugh that tears itself from her lips is a slightly nervous sound. "Of course not." Her eyes narrow. "What would you do without me?"

"I have no idea," Neji admits, figuring there's nothing for it but to tell the plain truth. She's always been there; not always as a friend, but always there.

Tenten smiles again, that odd, enigmatic, unreadable smile, and then she leans down and kisses him: the pressure of a foreign mouth against his, like any other pressure on Neji's body, hurts, but not quite as much as anything else would have.


End file.
